WebCodecs

Category: Multimedia
Type: New or changed feature
Status: Enabled by default (Chrome 94)
Intent stage: Shipped

Summary

Provides efficient, low-level access to built-in (software and hardware) media encoders and decoders.

Motivation

Existing media APIs (HTMLMediaElement, Media Source Extensions, WebAudio, MediaRecorder, WebRTC) are high-level and narrowly-focused. A low-level codec API will better support emerging applications, such as latency-sensitive game streaming, client-side effects or transcoding, and polyfillable media container support, without the increased network and CPU cost of JavaScript or WebAssembly codec implementations.

Standards & signals

Specification: https://wicg.github.io/web-codecs/
Firefox: Positive — co-editing the spec (Paul Adenot)
Safari: No signal — "We have some concerns about WebCodecs, but don’t think we’ve stated a public position on it. Concerns about fingerprinting and design of the API, but I don’t think it’s fair to say “negative”. " - Myles Maxfield
Web developers: Positive — Wikipedia: https://discourse.wicg.io/t/webcodecs-proposal/3662/9 Twitch: https://discourse.wicg.io/t/webcodecs-proposal/3662/12 Sony: https://discourse.wicg.io/t/webcodecs-proposal/3662/13
Tracking bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=897297

Docs: https://github.com/WICG/web-codecs/blob/master/explainer.md

Explainers: https://github.com/WICG/web-codecs/blob/master/explainer.md

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